Web 2 and Education - a new topic heading needed ?

[Styloid]

This may not be the right place for the discussion - but "web 2" is going to shape educational ICT profoundly in the next few years.

I have no idea how it will turn out or if it can deliver the things claimed of it.

Maybe its covered by other areas such as VLE - but I'd like to suggest a new section here.

Web 2.0 in Education & Profiles home is a good place to start if you don't know quite what I'm talking about.

As I see it web 2 is original a product of the "techieshere" - and making big inroads into management thinking and practices.

This site is a great example of it.

And web 2 should be in all schools soon.

Is web 2 the same as VLE, MLE?, how can the products of web 2 be used in education?, how to shift the mind set of school management and teachers to embrace it ? WTF exactly is Web 2 anyway ? How can you explain it to a 55 year old teacher ?

For me these are important and interesting questions and I would love to invite you to explore these with other interested people here on this site.

Cheers

[My220x]

I see Web 2.0 as blogging and podcasts, so to explain it to a teacher say that they could get there class to make podcasts which other students could then listen to on there digital media players.

[DarkLight]

Some teachers here are already making use of more popular methods of content delivery - such as podcasts and blogging - for example some teachers are surveying students to determine which topics in a subject are hardest, and creating podcasts to help with students' revision sessions.

In addition, the headteacher also has his own blog on blogspot. Pretty ironic considering all other blogspot blogs are filtered.

[Lithium]

Web2.0 is a term that should never ever ever ever ever be used quite frankly.

It means nothing really, and that's why nobody who isn't "down with the internet" understands it.

In a nutshell, anything that promotes creativity, sharing of information or any form of innovation on an already exisiting thing gets labelled as Web 2.0.... which is stupid... that makes most of the net fall into the Web 2.0 category...

There's even talk of "Web 3.0"...

Anything on the web current, or future, can have a beneficial impact in education, it's how you choose to use it that will dictate whether it's successful.

Instead of getting kids to draw creatures and describe them in french, we can get them to play with the Spore Creature Creator... you could possibly get away with running a social networking site for your college....

[kesomir]

my understanding was that web 2.0 refers more to the switch from a click based web experience to a more desktop based experience using ajax / flash / silverlight to perform backend queries and updates to the front end without a full page refresh.

Collaborative / community / interactive tools existed for decades before the marketing phrase 2.0 so I don't see how that could fit.

You're right it not meaning anything though

[My220x]

my understanding was that web 2.0 refers more to the switch from a click based web experience to a more desktop based experience using ajax / flash / silverlight to perform backend queries and updates to the front end without a full page refresh.

Collaborative / community / interactive tools existed for decades before the marketing phrase 2.0 so I don't see how that could fit.

You're right it not meaning anything though

Yes this is how I know it as but in a teachers use and most people know it as blogging and such.

[GrumbleDook]

Web2.0 is a term that should never ever ever ever ever be used quite frankly.

It means nothing really, and that's why nobody who isn't "down with the internet" understands it.

We have always used new terms to try and pigeon-hole stages of development ... we had the bronze age, the iron age, the dark ages, teh industrial revolution ... this is not much different. It is just that we have the hype that goes along with this sort of thing now. Web 2.0 is well documented and covered by most of the people that can explain it in non-condescending language for those 'not with the scene!' Have a look for Tim O'Reilly's stuff for a start.

In a nutshell, anything that promotes creativity, sharing of information or any form of innovation on an already exisiting thing gets labelled as Web 2.0.... which is stupid... that makes most of the net fall into the Web 2.0 category...

There's even talk of "Web 3.0"...

Yep ... as with any set of developments there are always people who want to take things even further and have ideas about what it means. If web 2.0 is the read/write web then Web 3.0 is the service based web ... everything is a service and we just have to work out how it hooks together ... we are already getting there when you consider the way things like twitter, facebook, etc can be part of mash-ups.

Anything on the web current, or future, can have a beneficial impact in education, it's how you choose to use it that will dictate whether it's successful.

Instead of getting kids to draw creatures and describe them in french, we can get them to play with the Spore Creature Creator... you could possibly get away with running a social networking site for your college....

Or you can use it to demonstrate relationships between services and how information is controlled and passed.

I have to agree though that technology for technology's sakes is not always good and it has to be balanced. People should not throw away old skills just becasue there are new ones to be learnt ... we are still at a stage of transition where all skills need to be learnt and the most important one is how to choose what skills to apply to the different problems, especially since a number of the skills are teh same no matter whether you use technology or not, or have a selection of technologies to use.

[webman]

Web 2.0 refers to the types of websites that exist where their main content is provided by the user - eg. Youtube, Flickr, Delicious; compared to the "Web 1.0" sites where the primary content was provided by the site owner and had little to no interaction with the user (eg. News sites).

For the record, I don't like the buzzword terms Web 1.0, 2.0, etc as I believe they are factually/technically incorrect. The web hasn't really changed version - in general, the same technologies are still being used at the heart of the majority of the sites (HTTP, HTML, CSS, Javascript and Flash).

In one way, things are going full-circle. Originally, if you wanted a discussion forum or a web gallery, you would choose from one of several websites that offered that service (for a fee, or for free if you could put up with adverts). A while later, people bought their own domains, ran their own servers, and developed their own scripts. Home-made (and commercial) scripts flooded the web that anyone could take and install on their own site and run themselves. Now it seems we are going back to where we were before - relying on the services provided by others - to get done what we need to do.

[beeswax]

How can you explain it to a 55 year old teacher ?

Cheers

...or a 55 year old techie?